so i do succumb to feelings of "not being trans* enough" at times. i have never felt "trapped" in my own body. my own body is fine and dandy and has served me well. it just doesn't match my gender. and i've never wanted hormones or surgery, and i like my name and don't want to change it, and so i'm male in a female body - basically, so what? if i was born in a male body i would still wear dresses and all - in this day & age & u.s. culture, girls' and womens' clothes are way more fun & expressive than mens' clothes, plus if you haven't tried it, do sometime - a long cotton or rayon skirt & a t-shirt -- very very comfortable. i even x-country skied in short dresses, just wear long underwear or thick tights or leg warmers to keep your legs warm.i am 67 years old. when i was a kid/& adult up to the past 10 yrs or so, there wasn't any "transgender" really. just some crazy freaks like christine jorgenson maybe (an extremely brave person) and friends of mine who had surgery etc were called "sex changes". nowadays it is amazing, really there are many many trans* people out there - otherwise why would there be this ridiculous controversy about bathrooms & all? ever since i was maybe 3 yrs old i knew i was a little boy but everybody said i was a little girl and i thought it was some sort of mistake or joke being played on me. i never understood or fit in with girls, even though i know some i love dearly, but i feel like an alien spy around them. (high school gym showers- yikes - i felt like somebody might "find out" & toss me out, even beat me up...) i did get to be basically a little boy up until maybe first grade - got to run around with no shirt & do butch things like carpentry. but then later it was all "be ladylike" etc. i still did some butch things though. i remember in the 70s doing drywall & my landlady acting like it was the most bizarre thing - "is this womens' lib?" she asked. like it relies on gender to hammer in nails & smooth out spackle. really the jobs only a female-bodied person can do is be a wet nurse, egg donor or surrogate mother and the job only a male bodied person could do is be a sperm donor. - did i forget anything? well, you get the drift, right? the most accepted i have ever felt was back in the 1970s in san francisco, living in a gay (guys) commune, the mukluks, and being one of the guys and people even picked up on it and said things like "wendy isn't a girl" without me saying anything, and now in slac, student labor action coalition [ http://slacuw.com ] dear wonderful friends treat me like it's perfectly ok to be a guy in a dress (um, with boobs & long hair, even, plus those other female body things like a uterus). i've never suffered from being trans*, but instead for being in a female body, the things female persons suffer from in this fucked up society - sexual assault, low pay for the same job as male type persons, being dismissed, not believed, having ideas stolen by male types, being judged by looks, etc. blah . anyway, now some people (like, slac-ers, and some trans* friends, and recently nurses & dr.s etc when i was in the hospital) actually call me he and him - which feels [a bit] more normal for me. she and her always seemed odd & didn't fit right. i don't care really what people call me as long as it isn't mean or threatening etc. or as my mother used to say, "call me anything but late for dinner". haha. if people feel weird calling me he instead of she, that's ok. i'm just very touched that some people do call me he without squirming. this is turning into too long of a rant, but so, no surgery, no name change, am i "not trans* enough"? but i _am_ trans*, that's the only pigeonhole i've managed to fit into. um, so love to you all who understand & don't make fun of me. xoxoxoxoxo wendy

i haven't _tried_ to do anything in my life since fourth grade, about 9 or 10 years old,"tried" meaning went beyond my capabilities & pushed myself higher than i thought i could go, and _i won a fucking spelling bee_ .for a study unit on hawaii our 4th grade class made a mural, maybe 3ft by 6ft, on brown paper, with volcanoes & palm trees & ocean & fish & birds & hula girls & people cooking stuff over a fire for a luau, all out of colored construction paper & crayon drawings.i thought this mural was wonderful. at the end of the study unit, the teacher (mrs. chandler at randall school, for any of you madison people) had a contest and whoever wins gets the mural. the contest was a spelling bee. here i am kind of dyslexic, not real bad, but can't tell left from right, can't tell time on an analog clock, & letters in words and words themselves sometimes jump around or flip over on the page, & can’t spell worth beans (thank you dictionary & spell check for all your help! ) but i tried and pushed myself beyond what i'd ever done and i _won the spelling bee_.so i won the mural & got to take it home & i _loved_ that mural and still today wish i had it (it would be so funny now, kid cutouts and drawings but it would still be wonderful). i got to put it up in the hall (longer walls...) but then after about a month mama made me throw it out and i leaned a huge life lesson - it isn't worth it to try, you just lose in the end.so all my life since i have never tried, i have never pushed myself to something greater, i have always done the easy fun way out, just sit back and watch things fall into place.maybe people think "trying" would be involved with getting a degree in physics & astronomy, or gardening or making clothes or photography or computer stuff i do, but no - i only do what is fun and interesting and no pushing myself, so i'll glide along with it.,like studying astronomy & physics - every day, every lecture or reading or homework problem, there was something that just elated me, wow this is so _cool_, so it wasn't any "effort". i am pretty sure if i tried i could have gotten as in school, but why bother? and i'm not talking physical effort, like planting a garden - turning it over & chopping up clumps of soil & raking - it's soothing and you can space out and think about things.(an aside - when i was a kid we went to friends first day school/quaker sunday school. my parents are atheists but some nice elderly quaker aunts took us. anyway, i also stayed for meeting for worship - basically you just sit there for an hour and think about things. wonderful sense of spiritual community. and it has given me an excellent tool the rest of my life. no big deal to wait in line or at an appointment at an office - you just space out & think about things. so much more pleasant than getting all impatient & angry.) and art & photography? when i draw i just watch my hand drawing and find out what it is when it's done. and i just see things & take a picture & then darkroom or digital processing is easy & fun. and i make shortcuts - less trouble - like when i make bread (and you all should try making bread. it really is simple & easy & you get delicious, more healthy & much cheaper than at the store bread), i have a big aluminum bowl, maybe a foot & a half in diameter, and i mix the dough for 2 loaves of bread, but then - knead on a floured board? are they kidding? i just add a bit more flour so it doesn’t stick & mush the dough around in the bowl & then roll it up in my hands & stick it in the pan & it makes perfectly good bread & nice looking loaves, & much less clean up. and the jobs i've had? just coast along easy peasy. for example, i worked at a place making hand-made jewelry - hammering & filing & punching holes in silver & gold & brass, casting silver - all stuff you can just do all jolly & not tax yourself. and i did this kind of consulting sort of teaching job in at the uw-madison art department showing people how to do alternative photography (gum bichromates, blueprints, etc) (oh, and check out my alternative photography web page - you don't need a darkroom of film or camera to do this easy fun photography, 150+ year old processes i want to help continue on --- http://wendymukluk.com/mukluk/oat.html) and other photo related stuff - copy camera, photo offset lithography (Fine Art mind you, and i actually did take a class in that. not the other stuff though) and computer graphics. all Fun and all Easy, & i could do a lot of my own art & had a big budget for tons of supplies, & tons of equipment ...copy camera platemakers darkroom computers scanners big plotter printer offset press... and i got paid for it!from 1992 to 2001 i did all the dars code for the student affairs & short course web sites for the college of agriculture at uw-madison, and then after that until 2012 i did dars coding for letters & science (maybe call it "programming" - hard to explain. it's computer stuff) and i never took a class in dars or web stuff - html, css, or other things like sql, or java - i just figured it out on my own to do what i wanted to do & it was easy & fun. i don't "know" java for example, but i can putter through making some java thing happen. i know dars really well, but can't explain it to anyone. i think in colored blobs - concepts of physics & art & computer stuff & cooking etc are just these sort of pastel or brownish blobs, without words attached. so i have gotten in trouble for this. people get mad. oh well. but it just happens i am good at figuring out codes. i am not musical at all, not athletic, no good at say, speeches or organizing, but a bunch of symbols saying something? easy & fun. i want to thank my cousin marian for this, too - when i was in grade school she gave me a book about secret codes for my birthday. well, not all secret - it had morse code, but also transposing letters in the alphabet & stuff like that. also writing messages in milk or lemon juices but i digress. so it fueled my enthusiasm, and i'm just lucky that way - computer code, grammar, mathematics (beyond arithmetic - a mystery to me) just fall into place & make sense.and then getting more kozmic, (about trying and perfection) i was thinking how somewhere i heard about doing something perfect is challenging the gods and you have to leave a flaw to let the evil spirits out. i believe in _all_ the gods and spirits and everything else. sure you can't go up and shake the easter bunny's hand (paw), but all these little kids believe the easter bunny brings them candy eggs, so the easter bunny does have an existence, and same for gods, spirits, fairies, kelpies, ghosts, they all exist. maybe if we are lucky we can actually find some physical presence -- like with ghosts??? maybe maybe???)but really humans are not capable of perfection, doing something _absolutely_ perfect. so, of course, that gives us the excuse of saving face by not challenging the gods, & letting the evil spirits out. like those topping off trees they put up at some construction sites - a little xmas tree stuck on the top of a crane or the framework of a building. let the gods know we are not trying to challenge or outdo them. (i love to think there are gods floating around, thor and osiris and yahweh and pele and zeus and all of them.) but if one is atheist this can mean acknowledging human frailty or faults.it's all the same, just semantics.i used to have some in-depth discussions with a deeply christian bible thumping friend and we both came to realize we were talking about the same thing, just different words. god equals the universe/forces/physics/mathematics/etc. and i was thinking about various cultures' cosmologies. australinan aborigines' cosmological ideas are basically string theory - vibrations that manifest as some physical thing maybe. and when i took a class in string theory, hearing about 26 dimensional branes (membranes) in a "bulk universe" of Everything, and maybe our universe, what we can see & sense, is a little chunk on one brane, 4 dimensional to us humans (3 space & 1 time), a bubble that was the result of an explosion or something. and i saw that ancient descriptions, like, the universe is a giant turtle swimming through cosmic seas, with giant elephants standing on its back, holding up a big thing, disc sort of, that is the earth and sky and animals and plants and everything we humans can know, is actually the same as a bit on a brane. it's just words. we humans have all our languages and can't put some concepts or existances in the universe into any accurate words, and we humans can't grasp the whole scheme of things anyway. like infinity - we can kind of grasp numbers going on and on, or time going on and on, no beginning and no end, but anything else - space, things existing, we can't do it. thinking of space going on forever, or things like our world and physics and all just always existing. like some calculations, theories, and speculations about the big bang -maybe all the physical particles/energy/stuff/"rules" have always been there. and then just turning into a big bang at some point. maybe virtual particles and inflation - that everything is "made of nothing". well, then you have the vacuum, & the potential matter and energy that can pop into existence. and everything/nothing _has always been there_ it didn’t start anywhere, and even if our universe implodes or something, or some people think time will "stop", still, all that stuff whatever it is has always existed and always will - "nothing" has always "existed".

aiaiai i think about stuff like this when i am trying to sleep & it makes my brain hurt.

robin williams' death brings to mind my own suicide attempts [but i am too inept and/or other people stopped me] and the overwhelming insurmountable pain and hopelessness and prison of depression. it is really impossible to describe to non-depressed persons. nothing "helps" - think of something nice? watch a funny movie? be with friends and relatives who hug you and tell you how much they love you? make art or music or win an award or excel at work or school? meditation/exercise/religion/diet/hobbies/classes/jobs/charity/community-political-religious social justice work? ... nothing nothing nothing makes the despair and hopelessness and physical pain of existence go away. and with the despair is the sense of causing a huge burden on your loved ones, on everything - i have often felt like a pox upon the universe that needs to be eradicated so that everyone else can be relieved and happy. suicide can be because you love and care about people and don't want to hurt them any more.

what to do? - much more education and awareness about depression [and other "mental illnesses"], much more access to help [and more effective help - training/research for the helpers], more research on how to deal with or even "cure" it.things that just make it worse and don't help one bit are shame [oh, other people are worse off than you, stop being lazy and selfish...] and brainwashing and lack of understanding [depression is not the same as the sadness you might feel if your team lost the game or if you lost your job or if your romance ended or if a loved one died or a hurricane destroyed your town or anything like that]. in my case and some other people i know, and i believe in general, depression is biochemical. nothing outside you can do anything, nothing you do to the rest of your body does anything, the only thing i have found that abates it or makes it "tolerable" are drugs that change brain chemistry. i have taken celexa, paxil, prozac etc, and lamictal, and have been on effective enough doses in the past couple years to stop me from actually following through on suicidal thoughts. not that it stops the thoughts. luckily for me i have a seasonal mood disorder and in winter i am happy happy happy, but spring brings overwhelming despair/suicidal feelings, summer brings a fog and emptiness and suicidal feelings, and fall begins to show a light at the end of the tunnel with a bit of suicide mixed in. but other people are not so lucky to have the relief of a season and they experience the despair and hoplessness _all year round_.

or if your public library has old copies of harpers, maybe you can find it: harper's magazine january 1988---and here are some of my poems - start at the bottom of the page and scroll up. sort of shows the influence of a higher dose of lamictal as time goes on. i think. i guess.http://wendymukluk.com/mukluk/writing/writing.html

years ago i once found myself in a "situation"...i was _very_ drunk & stoned, and blacking out, and some creepy guy i'd never seen before in my life & if i'd been sober i sure wouldn't have even looked at twice at him let alone talk to him or even let him near me, just swooped in, took me away from the nightclub i was at, when i was blacking out, and i ......ugh ugh ugh..... eventually woke up and found myself in a bed naked with this creep on top of me. all these years i have had a hard time saying this was "rape". was it "rape", when i was so fucked up i was falling down and blacking out? i was wearing a "sexy" dress, and trashed and staggering at a nightclub packed with people, and couldn't find my friends. all these years, and still even now, i feel embarrassed & responsible & guilty -i screwed up and made it easy for this asshole. i have heard many stories from other people about some creep holding a knife at their throat or a gun to their head, or locking them in a room, or punching them in the face...but that didn't happen to me. it was me stumbling around and saying garbled stuff and blacking out while wearing a tight low-cut dress ...i didn't say "no". i didn't say much of anything except "gaaaahhhh" or similar statements. i might have even said stuff about fucking. i was that trashed. but any kind of sex with this creep? no no no no no. but how to convey that when i'm falling on the floor.but i still feel guilty, i still feel that i was wrong, i still feel, when people talk about rape, that i wasn't "raped", it was some stupid mistake of mine i should have somehow prevented (how??). so... how fucked up is that? am i wrong?plus i'm um, not exactly a "girl", i some freak trans* person, but i looked like, back then, some babe. so i'm in a female body, so i'm "male", does any of that matter? so, if you are not a "girl" and some cis straight man forces himself on you sexually, do you have any right to complain?

when it happened, some friends laughed at me - what a funny escapade - you don't get enough sex anyway.and my [a-hole] partner at the time, when i called and hadn't come back yet, told me "don't bother coming home".i had somehow betrayed and destroyed our "relationship" by this terrible act on my part.

how do i get over this? it still bothers me, 30 years later.

so today i am especially angry, i'm not sure why, and typing this up.

so you aren't supposed to put anything "personal" on social media or the web in generalbut i have no secrets, i don't care what people think of me now,and i hope somehow my [stupid] story might make others feel empowered to tell their stories or do something, anything - activism, lawsuits, being supportive of others, write, make speeches, videos, _anything_.

any of us - no matter gender or identity, any of us who have suffered abuse or injustice (of any kind, not just sexual) - have to be free and empowered and stop feeling shame. ha, i still have a way to go on that.

and i think that whole "no means no" ad campaign is stupid and pointless - it should be "yes means yes". maybe even something more emphatic.being passed out or saying gaaahhh isn't a clear "no" statement, but absolutely doesn't mean yes.

(the 43000 yr old plant mentioned here, the tasmanian shrub in the family proteaceae is a clone, made of individuals that live about 300 yrs.)... hmmm... they could have left out the silly scenes of people upside down)

..and another repost from facebook:Schizophrenics are NOT dangerousMarch 9, 2014 at 10:30pm

i really get annoyed about a lot of people's ignorance about schizophrenia. my best beloved and several friends roommates etc. are schizophrenic. when Other People find out i live with someone who is schizophrenic, they say all this krap about how they worry about me and are concerned for my safety.

but when they find out i go to parties or bars alone at night, they aren't concerned for my safety. when i do electrical repairs at my home they aren't concerned for my safety. if they know i drink a lot they aren't concerned for my safety. if they know about/meet a roommate of mine who is really nice & cheerful & helps me a lot around the house, they aren't concerned for my safety.

but then, if they find out that nice roommate is schizophrenic, suddenly they are concerned about my safety. what rot. so fkn bogus grr. most schizophrenic people are NOT dangerous.here's something: if it was a common ocurrance for "crazy" people to berserk and kill a bunch of people, it wouldn't be front page news, same as if, say, airplanes often crashed. it would be a little article on page 4 maybe, not on the front page. people going berserk is a rare thing, and even if you see several stories over the space of a year about mass killers, think about what per cent of the population those represent. there are roughly 300 million people in the u.s. see: average current u.s. population: https://www.census.gov/popclock/about 1% of the u.s. population suffer from schizophrenia, roughly 3 million people out of 300 million people. see: http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-numbers-count-mental-disorders-in-america/index.shtml#Schizophreniain the past 10 - 20 years, there were about 30 mass killings per year, not all perpetrated by schizophrenics. but if you assumed all of them were schizophrenics, that's 30 people going berserk out of 3 million schizophrenic people. that comes out to about .001%see: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/dec/17/mass-multiple-murder-rates-constant-despite-overal/there were 16,259 homicides in 2010, certainly not all committed by schizophrenics, remember there is domestic violence, gang killings, botched robberies, etc.see: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htmbut let's just pretend nobody ever murders anybody except schizophrenics. then you would have roughly 16,000 murderers out of roughly 3,000,000 schizophrenics. that comes out to about 0.5% of schizophrenics (or if you figure 16,000 murders per 300 million u.s. population, that's .005% of the general population that committed murder. which is more accurate.)

a long rambling rant about mice in drains and sacredness of life and logistics of different dietary beliefs and related whatnot.yet another repost from facebook's hidden can't find 'em notes section. January 3, 2014 at 7:02pm

this morning when i was brushing my teeth i noticed something moving around under the drain strainer. first i thought it was some wad of lint and hair wiggling because of the water hitting it. but then it looked more and more like an animal nose. there was a mouse in the sink drain. how in the world did it get in there? so i took off the strainer and was wondering how to get it out. there wasn't much room between the mouse and the sides of the pipe. so i put the edge of a towel down the drain and it climbed out, and then i took it in the towel down to the basement and let it go.this sort of thing puts me in a gray area of morality/ethics. what is the best thing to do?

i have my own religious or philosophical beliefs. one thing is i believe all life is sacred and should be respected. that means _all_ life: humans, elephants, mice, ants, sequoia trees, dandelions, apple trees, amoebas, flu viruses, all life. (well, actually, i believe all inanimate things deserve respect, too - air, water, rocks, soil, etc.)i believe it is ok to kill if you are going to eat it or use it or if it is threatening you. just be respectful and humane. don't do anything wanton or wasteful.

so i believe it is ok to eat bacon or carrots and make shoes out of the leather from the animal you got meat from or make a table out of wood or take penicillin when you have an infection.

i am just against factory farms, dousing everything with hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, and genetic engineering, pollution, clear cutting rain forest etc. disrespecting life and nature and our planet. but there are ways to kill animals as quickly as possible, so they never knew what hit them, and ways to harvest plants that don't wreak havoc with any nearby life, plant or animal. but i always am in a dilemma about what to do with minor threats, you might call them.

i don't kill anything i don't need to.

i try not to squish mosquitoes when they bite me - sometimes i accidentally do, but usually i just wait for them to fill up on blood and fly away (i only get a mild reaction - just a little welt that itches a little for an hour or so. i don't know what i'd do if i had a serious allergic reaction). i don't step on ants or cockroaches or use bug spray. i try to make things less inviting for them - keep food in containers, empty the trash often, clean up spills right away - so they don't find all kinds of great food and come back in force. mice - well, a few who stay in the house in winter and then go outside in summer & forage for seeds and all - that's ok. just not tons of mice gnawing boxes & getting into the flour. my cats kill and eat mice, so i guess things are sort of in balance, nature-wise. so much of nature is out of whack because of human meddling. nature by itself is a well working balanced system. like, wolves hunt deer, and weak sick wolves don't get deer to eat and weak sick deer get eaten by wolves, so they both keep each other strong. then humans kill off a lot of wolves and the deer population explodes. so actually, humans hunting deer is a tiny way to try to regain some facsimile of balance, as well as not hunting wolves. most human hunters i know do not just wantonly kill things, they have sort of an almost reverence for nature, and killing a deer means food for the family, and they try to kill it quickly - like, a shot right between the eyes or somesuch. of course i am against wackos who just want to kill kill kill. like those people who go on safari in africa and kill elephants and lions just to kill something.every year i have to ponder weeding the garden. i guess it is a "threat" for weeds to crowd out flowers and vegetables i planted. i try to do minimal weeding - make space around my planted plants, but leave weeds that are on the sides of the garden or between rows. and apologize to the spirits of the plants i killed. so far, ants and cockroaches and mice and mosquitoes have not been a big threat to me, so i'm not going to try to get rid of them (mass murder them). i don't know what i'd do if the house was in danger.

about 20 years ago there were carpenter ants in the basement and they were eating away at the supports of the stairs. i had a cigar box in the bathroom, full of lipstick and some wrapped bars of soap. one day when i went into the bathroom, i saw something shiver out of the corner of my eye. i looked, and there was a roiling mass of carpenter ants on the cigar box. so i took it outside (this was in the summer) and the ants made a hasty retreat, carrying their babies, and took off in a direction away from my house. they had chewed up the soap wrappers and pasted together the lipstick tubes and had the babies in the resulting tunnels between the tubes. i haven't had carpenter ants in the house since. i don't know what i would do if there were carpenter ants or termites undermining my house. i guess first i would try to make them go away with maybe something they don't like that taste or smell of. i've used marigolds & garlic to keep some insects away from my flowers. also had a fake owl in the attic to scare away mice & squirrels. i have always felt/believed plants are just as important as animals, and lately i have been reading scientific papers about plant intelligence. i always believed plants are intelligent, even sentient, in a way we can't fathom, but their lives are so so so different from us that we can't understand at all. what would it be like to stay in one exact spot your entire life, even if you live for thousands of years?

plants sense the same things we humans can - they sense light, and touch - heat, humidity, gravity, and can sense sound, and chemical signals (like our taste/smell). they communicate with each other, through chemical signals (like the smell of fresh mowed grass is an announcement/warning to other grass) and through high frequency vibrations, and even use certain kinds of fungus as a conduit.

and they sure manipulate animals - for instance, i am amazed by orchids whose flowers look like female wasps, and they spread pollen through the male wasps mating with several blossoms. i also revere some plants just because they are old or huge. it seems like they have something we should be in awe of, maybe some sort of amazing wisdom. for example, 5,000 year old bristlecone pines, and thousand year old sequoia trees, and giant underground mycelia (one honey mushroom individual in oregon covers four square miles and is between 2,000 or maybe even 8,000 years old). who are we to say these don't count somehow or don't have rights, or it's ok to kill them, just because they are not part of kingdom animalia?it is interesting that when i say plants are living beings. people who are vegan or vegetarian get mad at me or make fun of me, while people who are omnivores agree with me and even mention scientific papers about plant intelligence.

it does bother me that most vegetarian or vegan people (not all!) i talk to seem to think plants are things, like, say, paperclips or light bulbs. i think that is sad, actually. i know some people will think i'm crazy, (ha! but i _am_ crazy, so get over it! bwa ha ha ha. run! run!) but then others i know have had similar experiences: sometimes if you go out in the woods and make yourself still, you can "hear" the trees. or other plants. they don't "say" "howdy there." or anything, but somehow they convey abstract idea/feelings. like, i've "heard/sensed/felt" something like "growth" or something like that from trees in some woods, or a direction, i think towards the sun in that valley or by that lake. it is really impossible to translate. actually, we humans don't even communicate well with other mammals. like whales, for example. they are as intelligent & sentient as humans. but their life is so different - they don't need to build shelters or make clothes or plant gardens or make vehicles or make communication devices.

i read that before humans made so much noise with engines and sonar and drilling, whales could communicate all over the world, sing songs that whales hundreds of miles away could hear and then relay messages.

what whales may think about and sing must be very different from what we might imagine. maybe they have some things we could grasp, like concepts of navigation or weather or ocean currents or plankton. but maybe they have some sort of mathematics/philosophy/poetry/music that we'll never be able to comprehend. but we humans are not the be all and end all or better than other life forms.also i wonder about the details and logistics that people have who believe killing animals is wrong no matter what. i believe that since we humans are animals, we have to kill to survive; we can't make our own food out of light & water & air like most plants can; we have to kill other plants and animals to get the nutrition we need.

we can get basic nutrition from plants, but then we are still killing living beings. and interrupting their lives. for example, carrots and turnips and the like spend all summer storing up food so that they can bloom and produce seeds the following year, but we humans kill them, rip them out of the ground, roots and leaves and all, in the first year while they were storing, and we chop them up alive and eat them, so they don't get their chance to bloom and go to seed. and then humans have teeth for tearing flesh and grinding vegetable matter...i don't mean anything mean or disrespectful, but i am wondering -- what counts as an "animal", if it is wrong to kill animals? does that mean anything in the kingdom animalia? or just some phyla or species or whatever? and what are the criteria? of course don't kill chordates, i guess. but in the phylum arthropoda -- if it's wrong to kill a lobster, what about a bedbug - since both are in the phylum arthropoda, part of kingdom animalia. how do you not kill any animals at all, for instance, dealing with mosquitoes or cockroaches or lice or tapeworms or an amoeba infection? i was wondering, say for lice, could you carefully comb out the insects and their eggs, and then put them in a terrarium and feed them blood from your finger? but they'd probably eventually die off. but then you tried to keep them alive. ??? some people have told me they don't want to kill anything that has pain receptors, but i'm wondering how you define that? a plant doesn't have eyes that can cry or a brain (well, maybe roots are brains of sorts) or nerves, but can you prove they don’t "feel" anything? why would cut grass warn other grass plants? i think we, all humans, even me, tend to be anthro centric - is that the word - ? we compare everything to us, to our bodies, thoughts, civilizations, as if we are somehow the standard by which all should be measured and compared.

but i try not to be so human-centric, and try to see the big picture. i think studying astronomy helped - seeing what a tiny speck the earth is, what a tiny speck the solar system is, what a tiny speck the milky way is in the universe. we are nothing.

plus, we humans are part of the earth and life and nature on our planet, and we can't make value judgements. we can't put human morals on animals and plants. and human morals change with time & circumstance. just read about different cultures and civilizations besides your own. things you might think repugnant and immoral are perfectly ok in some other schemes of things. and vice versa.

who is right? it seems we are filled with hubris if we think we are Right. i mean any we, any time, any where. but then, one might as well try to live as morally and ethically and compassionately as one's culture defines it.

aaaaiiiieeee... ok i will stop, too much rambling, sorry, but let me know what you think and please don't be offended, i am but one being spewing out my beliefs i have honed over many years of thinking, reading, conversing, experiencing, hallucinating, dreaming.

and, gaaah, i can't get that image of mouse nose wiggling in the drain out of my mind. eeeeeek.

.....addendum:something else i've been thinking/wondering. it seems to me that veganism and privilege go hand in hand. i don't mean to offend my vegan friends, and please do explain that i am wrong, because actually i do hope my anecdotal observations are wrong. in the past 40 - 50 years i've met, got to know, became friends with vegans and non-vegans, and in my limited experience, all the vegans i know are white middle class people with money and transportation. and then, all these non-white people i know, i mean like black & hispanic & american indian, are not vegans, and people i know who are "disadvantaged" - live in inner city ghetto or are rural poor, are not vegan. and they don't have that choice, like inner city people with no money or transportation can't get to big grocery stores or farmer's markets or out to farms in the country. they are stuck with convenience store krap food. and rural poor might have a vegetable garden & fruit & nut trees, but in winter, they have to go out and shoot some rabbits or deer or something just to keep from starving. so... also what to do about it? i really think somehow csa boxes should be made available to inner city people, for example. at least to get more vitamins & roughage, even if ppl still eat meat. we need to fight against factory farms & pollution etc. but meanwhile, the way things are today, thanks to greed and capitalism, a lot of people don't have the luxury of a choice about food or ideals about food.

the universe falls into placefrom facebooooook notesssssssss December 15, 2013 at 2:45pm

so, this has probably been bandied about already, but putting pieces of latest news together has made me happy. a better vision of Everything. we humans can't grasp infinite things & want things to have beginnings and endings. well, some things do, but some things don't. i like the idea that the universe has just been here forever. it didn't have a beginning. it just is (was/will be). i mean the bulk universe or everything everything, lots of universes etc. and then that the big bang might be the result of stuff from another brane squirting out & forming a new brane (our local "universe"). squirt explode whatever.

i never really felt comfortable with everything coming out of nothing. (well, depends on how you define "nothing". like, was there energy there? well, where did that come from?) so stuff coming from someplace else that already exists makes me feel better. and then, this idea that we might be in a computer simulation (for lack of a better term) might be because somebodything wondered what would happen if you explode some stuff out of a brane. hmm?

blessed beloveds fear not the genderfuckfrom facebook notes November 19, 2010 at 6:20pm

i am a blue fairy, the little silly,

the closest definition might be a drag queen in a female body, but that's not quite right either,

i never met anybody like me, i'm a fish out of water, a crime against nature and alien spy, a blasphemy, a glow in the dark, a spark of something different, something you should not be afraid of, someone who can show you some fabulous drag, someone who can bring you to a happy mad tea party, someone who can die in the flowers of the equinox at dawn and you would wonder what else i could have told you, how i could have helped you on the road to the beauty and love and freedom of the universe.

get that tulle and lame' and dark red lipstick and eye kohl out and and fear not.

i will be your fairy godmother, your ghost of drag, your safety in the storm, your wishes come true, if you'd just let me.

i'll haunt the world and bless the drag and not give up till i simmer away onto another brane into another dimension into another perpendicular reality of black holes stretching across the multidimensional membranes, into the love that is gravity and the forces of the universe, the all the everything.